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Reviews by Solicia

90

Great game, when it works!

So got this game because it was not only on sale, but I had a coupon to go with it! (cheap gamers unite!)

For the good: The game is phenomenal, a beautifully detailed world, wonderful voice overs, and the platforming is wonderful. I'm not a huge fan of the "quick time events", I always find they impede upon the game with their pop ups and the unnecessary roughness they can put on either controllers or (in my case) keyboards and mice, but this really doesn't pull away from the dark and gritty atmosphere this game sets. You REALLY feel for Laura, her life from start on through just doesn't get better.

The leveling system is a lot of fun, and encourages exploration to gain skills so life will be easier for you. Be careful while doing your exploration though, those wolves cheat, and that's all there is to it!

The death scenes are visceral, and not expected at all in some cases, there were several times I groaned out loud at what had occurred (ie: Laura had a boulder land on her legs, crushing them, then on her face, or when she took a bullet under the chin and up through her eye), the sounds they use just add to the gore effect, and it is brutal.

The bad: Those quick time events, at least on the pc version, don't tell you what button to hit! I wasn't aware whether I should hit 'f', or 'e', or what, when someone was trying to pull me back until I went into options to see what the symbols meant. There are tutorial pop ups, but they pop up when you have to press the button with an explanation, and there's no slow down on those moments, and it is only up for a second or two. With this, your first few deaths are not really enjoyable, as it was a lack of knowledge, personally I'd have liked the screen to pause, give the explanation, then unpause, at least at first, to get used to controls.

The other big issue only effects about half of the users, but it's massive for those it does hit. If you run an nvidia card (as I do), expect the game to crash, a lot. After doing some reasearch, it turns out that though the game was made for AMD, Crystal Dynamics gave nvidia an unfinished version, so the drivers were not up to the same speed that AMDs were, and they didn't have all the info, with this, the hair tesselation that AMD put in conflicts with the PhysX drivers that nvidia uses (there's more to this, but that's kinda the gist of it). nvidia is working really hard to fix this though, and in the first month of the games release, 3 beta driver releases occurred to try and fix it, and it did fix most of the issues...a few are still prevalent though. Be patient, because the game is great!

Overall: Despite my complaint of the beginning, quick time events, and crashes, this game is still a lot of fun, even while frustrated with it crashing, I want to get back into it, and continue exploring to find more of those pesky hidden items. It's worth grabbing, so pick up a copy! And go raid some tombs!